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What's the internet?

A network of computers all connected to each other and sharing information.

Foundationalbedrock

Last updated: March 12, 2025

The TL;DR

The internet is a network of computers all connected to each other and sharing information. 

  • When you load a web page or send an email, you’re connecting to another computer and sharing data with it

  • The internet is basically just a bunch of cables and wireless signals that let your computer talk to other computers

  • The internet we’re used to is public, but there are also private networks within organizations called intranets 

The internet is probably the technology that’s the most widely used but the most poorly understood: learning about how it works will make your life a lot easier. So read this.

Terms Mentioned

What’s the internet (theoretically)?

Think about the things that you can’t do on your phone or laptop without an internet connection (i.e. on that flight from hell): loading websites, sending messages, watching movies, etc. What exactly is happening when you do this stuff, and how does the internet fit in?

🚨 Confusion Alert

One of the reasons that so few people understand what the internet actually is: we use the term to refer to a lot of different things. The internet is not the same thing as the World Wide Web , or the cloud . Those things use the internet to work.

Accessing the internet just means communicating with other computers out there in the world. Let’s go through these one by one:

  • When you load a website, you’re downloading a series of HTML files from a server in the cloud (i.e. another computer)

  • When you send an email, you’re sending data to another computer (usually through a server in the cloud)

  • When you watch a movie on Netflix, you’re downloading data from a server in the cloud (or another computer if you’re using a Torrent)

It happens to be that most of the computers that you’re communicating with here are big servers in the cloud, but they’re still computers. The big reveal? That’s all the internet is: it’s the infrastructure that actually connects your computer and all of the other ones in the universe.

What’s the internet (literally)?

The internet seems like it’s some larger than life, magical system, but it’s really just a network of connecting things. When you access the internet, you’re tapping into that network and communicating with a computer (or a group of comput...